Passports to a prettier past: The enduring appeal of bonnets, butlers and stiff upper lips

Viewers in England have fallen into swoons over Parade’s End, a new five-part television adaptation by Tom Stoppard set in the decade of 1908 through to the end of the Great War. That Benedict Cumberbatch stars as the tortured Tory husband of Ford Madox Ford’s novels doesn’t hurt, but beyond the day dresses and military costumes, it’s the central themes of sex, suffragettes and duty that have been of interest to viewers, and writers such as Julian Barnes, who recently praised Ford’s modern novel in an essay for the Guardian.

In the absence of a new season of Downton Abbey or access to Parade’s End, my recent costume melodramas have instead included The Forsyte Saga, available on Netflix Canada. The 2002 series is based on Nobel-winning writer John Galsworthy’s novels, which span three generations of a nouveau riche Victorian family — it stars Rupert Graves, Ioan Griffudd, Damian Lewis (who just won an Emmy for Homeland), Gina McKee and a whole lot of crushed velvet. In lieu of a Pemberley or Downton’s Downton there is Robin Hill, their classic Arts and Crafts pile, and an exploration of the moral codes of the Edwardian, then early modern era. Some of its original popularity surely had to do with the fact that it aired during the last frenzy of property obsession and materialism before the economic downtown, which are also Galsworthy’s themes in the books. Glossing over the Boer War and the death of Queen Victoria, The Forsyte Saga seems an uncanny parallel of the Manolos and martini obsession of Sex and the City-era Manhattan.

But Downton Abbey’s new season recently began airing in the U.K., and in an exclusive Grazia magazine interview this week costumer Caroline McCall (spoiler ahead!) reveals that the wedding gown for Lady Mary’s nuptials cost £4,000 ($6,365) to produce — more than any other single costume in the series so far. Judging by the retweeted links to the article alone, fans can’t get enough of this sort of tidbit, thanks to the current craze for lavish period dramas that fetishize the past (and lately, the Edwardian and early Jazz Age in particular).

“We do have these cycles of costume dramas,” says Dr. Rebecca Sullivan, a professor in the University of Calgary’s faculty of communications who specializes in feminist film, media and cultural studies. “We have cycles where we’ll be all about Shakespeare but in contemporary dress, or the postwar era, or la belle époque, and then cycles of Edwardian culture.”

“A couple of years ago it was all about Mad Men,” Sullivan cracks sarcastically. “Oh man, wouldn’t it be great if I could be sexually harassed at work while I wear a girdle and a bullet bra!”

In these serial aesthetic entertainments, the viewer stand-in is generally a plucky heroine who bristles at the societal restrictions of the era. “Costume dramas largely target female audiences and they target a sense of pure nostalgia for a history that never was,” Sullivan explains of not only historical television but film and novels. “One that is prettier, easier and one without consequences. It imprints contemporary values onto an imagined past to suggest that problems are easily solved.”

Even with below-stairs characters, the harsh realities of the era are cheerfully rendered with exquisite costumes beautifully shot, “usually from a bourgeois, if not elite, privileged perspective. That escapism treats the past as uncomplicated.

“There isn’t a whole heck of a lot of specificity because what costume dramas allow us to do so well is unmoor ourselves from historical specificity,” she adds. “Ask anybody who watches these what else was going on in the Edwardian era to connect three historical dots — it ain’t gonna happen.

“But the real beauty of the costume drama is that it prettifies the past, and creates a nostalgic longing for a time when all we did was wear beautiful clothes,” Sullivan says, calling the effect of the elaborate production and costume design “a disconnected otherworldliness that allows you not to feel grounded in social, political, economic conflicts and inequalities.”

Another theory is that as we inch into the teens, the late Edwardian era is long enough ago to be exotic, but still near enough so as to be recognizably modern. The shifting times — on the brink of war, of female emancipation, of film — speaks to another era of technology and communication that’s unfolding now. There are parallels to concerns of identity, not unlike the spate of American Westerns set in the late 1800s, which were enormously popular in the 1950s and capitalized on righteous patriotic sentiment. And in the wake of the fairytale Charles and Diana wedding, Britain was primed to be swept up in the fictional aristocratic life between the wars of Brideshead Revisited, which aired in 1981.

So it’s zeitgeist, then? Hardly. For every argument of cultural relevance, you could argue budgetary considerations: Those Westerns were cheap and easy to make (just head to the middle of nowhere with a bagful of 10-gallon hats, some chaps and a few horses). They were cheaper than the extensive cast of the current how-the-other-half-live genre —all those footmen and parlour maids! Although the latter is admittedly still cheaper to costume than Elizabeth I’s Tudor England milieu.

When I spoke with Downton-loving designer Anna Sui last fall, we digressed into a conversation about why that period, along with Sui’s beloved 1930s, continues to have such appeal. “It seemed like a last hurrah,” she said of the high-society screwball comedies and backstage musicals that were a disconnect from the realities of the Depression.

“I think that usually when times are hard, when there’s not only the economy but also the fears that are going on today, people retreat to a past when they feel there was more of a safeness. All those 1930s movies,” she continued, “talk about the way things had always been and nobody thought it would end. But it all did,” Sui added.

That said, “women are very knowledgeable that what they are doing is an escapist fantasy,” Sullivan admits: “And I’m as soapy as the next person — I love Gone with the Wind and watch it every time it comes on TV.”

Speaking of the 1930s, Love in a Cold Climate is next on my stack of period dramas. But while a two-parter in 2001 starred the lovely Rosamund Pike, it’s the longer original adaptation of Love in a Cold Climate that I’ve been waiting for since it first aired 30 years ago. (The eight-episode mini-series produced by the BBC in 1980 and later shown in North America on PBS Masterpiece.) All 405 minutes of it finally came out as a DVD box set last month.

Adapted from Nancy Mitford’s two bestselling novels, it concerns the bright young things of the posh Radlett family, between the wars. It is set at Alconleigh, a stately country manor modeled on the Mitfords’ own home, Batsford Park and, as any good costume drama must have its grande dame, stars a fortysomething Judi Dench as Aunt Sadie.

“We end up telling these stories of very difficult histories, but through the prettiest lens,” Sullivan reminds me, as I slip into a reverie telling her about the series. “Usually through that of the colonial overloads,” she cautions, before one last guffaw, “but oh, the clothes!”

Put another way: “How lovely — green velvet and silver. I call that a dream, so soft and delicious, too,” Mitford wrote of one of her Cold Climate ladies. “She rubbed a fold of the skirt against her cheek. ‘Mine’s silver lamé, it smells like a bird cage when it gets hot, but I do love it. Aren’t you thankful evening skirts are long again?’ ”